About Us

Mantra is a pottery in Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India under the Auroville Foundation, and is a branch of Artisana Trust.

We make high fired glazed stoneware suitable for the table and home, and in a limited way also work with other clays and glazes

Mantra was founded in April 1994 by Angad Vohra who had come to join Auroville as a Community member in 1979. He had apprenticed with Ray Meeker and Deborah Smith of Golden Bridge Pottery (www.raymeeker.com) from 1975 to 1979,in Pondicherry, under the protection of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (www.sriaurobindoashram.org) where he’d learned the trade to start with. The learning continued with Kottakarai Pottery from ’79-‘90 where he made salt glazed wood fired stoneware. ’90-’94 saw him partner with Michel Hutin, formerly of Poterie d’Aspiration when they created Shilpika and gave a boost to production pottery in Auroville, simultaneously starting to build another group of trainees (apart from those who learned at Golden Bridge) from the local villages. Many of these have gone on to become incredibly skilled and some have started their own potteries nearby. When Shilpika was dissolved in 1994 by mutual consent, Mantra came into being in the Kottakarai area of Auroville at 12⁰ 00’52.27”N and 79⁰ 48’22.20”E.
To know more about Auroville visit www.auroville.org

Our Company

The buildings have expanded over the years with the lean to’s attached to the main roof. A wood fired bisque kiln was added once we switched to gas for the glazing. This is visible on the right. Recently we raised the chimney and believe it will reach cone 9 or 10 if needed and if we ever get the urge to do wood fired glazed ware. As you can see the clay is prepared wet and dried in the sun in our special indirect air drying tanks, shown in the middle of this image. Since we want the sun here it was the logical place to put our solar panels over the mixing and sieving tanks where we exploit the shade of the panels to work under even in blazing summer!

Our Team

Up above and below you see our present team. If you remember our older photo, then you can see that there have been big changes in our team since 2020. Gopalakrishnan, who had been with us since 1996, left to work on his own in a nearby village. We wish him luck. Sathyamoorthy who’s grown up on our premises (his mother had worked here since ’96) has rapidly evolved in his skill as a potter and is currently running the production. His school friends Arul and Ganapathy have joined us as trainees and are progressing well. Sumathi and Selvaraj are still here and our newest addition is Kanagavalli, who provides basic support as she too learns to be useful at the pottery. We are a unit under Auroville, an international community located in a coastal district of Tamil Nadu just across the border from Pondicherry.